Space of Forgetting

30/01/14

Walking down the corridor at Farnham discussing the students, my colleague, the painter Bev Brennan, said "the trouble with students is they don't understand that you have to lose control in order to gain control...."

Marcel Duchamp's idea of the 'art coefficient' touches on this conundrum:

"In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realisation through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle towards the realisation is a series of efforts pains satisfactions, refusals, decisions which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is the difference between the intention and it's realisation, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the artists inability to express fully his intention; This difference between what he intended to realise and did realise, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work".